Spencer Heath Archive

Item 710

Taping by Spencer MacCallum during conversation with Heath.

1956?

 

 

/PARALLELS IN SCIENCE

  AND EARLY CHRISTIANITY/

 

 

     Nineteenth-century science was Galilean and Newtonian. It rested strictly on observation and experience. It did not run into metaphysical abstractions. In the 20th century, it divided into two streams, which may be called the Galilean and objective, primarily physical, and the Einsteinian, primarily subjective, mathematical and metaphysical — divorced from the limitations of objective experience.

     Nineteenth-century science was independent of both Church and State. The Church was hostile, and the State only too willingly employed the knowledge won by science almost exclusively towards destructive ends.

     The metaphysical branch of twentieth-century science sets up mathematical abstractions and tends to decry reliance upon objective experience and the use of mechanical models, all in favor of its metaphysical abstractions.

     This schism in modern science between the world of objective experience here and now and a world of subjective abstractions is comparable to what happened in the early Christian centuries. The religion of the New Testament had to do primarily (though not necessarily exclusively) with the objective life of this world. Its Founder dwelt among men in the living present, giving inspiration and counsel for the life of this world. He was not a cloistered metaphysician, withdrawn to his ivory tower or cell, or desert cave, but a man of this world and of this life in all its beauty and potentiality. He did indeed for a short time betake him to the wilderness. But He found no inspiration there. All his lessons were drawn from and illustrated in the common, everyday doings of men among men. He repudiated worldly power and extolled only and always the golden rule of mutual service without servitude as the divine alternative to the iron rule of “worldly” power, whether imperial and world-wide in Rome or local in the Sanhedrin.

     His formula of regeneration in this world was taken over by men with instinct for power. Pauline metaphysics for another world was the first departure. The Church soon took on the garments of the Empire, in alliance with the powers of the world that its Founder repudiated, and taught the life of the spirit for a future world while grasping the powers of government in the world of living men.

     Nineteenth-century science disregarded alike the metaphysics and the worldly tyranny of the Church. It sought to understand this present world, and through this understanding discovered a mighty power to rebuild it into abundance for the life of man. It was Galilean in its simplicity and practicality, just as that earlier Galilean teaching had been.